On April Fool's Day, The Chronicle ran a spoof headline: "China Invades Duke, SAT Scores Rise." Now, I like a good joke as well as the next guy, but this headline made me nervous. I will explain why.
After graduating from Duke in 1985, I returned to China where I had studied abroad and lived and worked as a journalist there for the next 18 years. I covered the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and did not return to the U.S. until I was finally put in jail for 30 days for my unwelcome reporting and then was expelled. So I know something about Chinese sensitivities.
Following the tragic events in 1989, in which I witnessed dozens of people shot and corpses in hospitals (I have photographic evidence) and in which the Chinese Red Cross told me 2,000 people had died before the Chinese military took over the hospitals and no more death figures were released, the Chinese government redoubled their efforts to inculcate a patriotic education in young Chinese, so that no large-scale movement like that led by the students of 1989 would repeat itself.
Throughout their education all Chinese are relentlessly reminded of China's "Guo Chi" [national humiliation]-almost two centuries of occupation, invasion, and colonization by foreign powers including the U.S.-that turned China into "the sick man of Asia" and only ended with the victory of Chairman Mao Zedong's Revolution in 1949, the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, and the expulsion of all foreigners from China. China had finally, in the words of Mao, "Stood up," and would not be bullied by foreigners anymore. This powerful resentment against China's former colonizers is never far below the surface of every Chinese person I know. It is understandable, although I believe that the Chinese government has cynically manipulated the patriotism of this young generation to deflect criticism from their own failed policies in Tibet, on the environment, even in the planning of this present Olympics torch relay, and onto foreign countries and their "biased" media who are trying to harm, weaken and divide China just like they did beginning two centuries ago.
This was the context in which the tragic events involving Duke freshman Grace Wang took place at the candlelight vigil for Tibet on April 9. To American eyes, what Wang did-try to get two sides in a protest/counter-protest who were shouting at each other to talk, was the most natural, harmless, constitutionally-protected action in the world. What her Chinese classmates saw was a "traitor" (what they were calling her during the protest) who refused to unquestioningly and obediently toe the party line, join with her countrymen and point the finger of accusation at the suspected and mistrusted foreigner, as they have been drilled to do from childhood. Therefore Wang was a threat to her classmates, an obstacle to China's rise to becoming a superpower and finally shedding the mantle of two hundred years of humiliation. She had to be made an example of.
Most Chronicle readers know what ensued. Wang received death threats, her family's address was publicized on a Duke University Web site, her home was vandalized and a bucket of feces was dumped in front of the door and her parents have been driven into hiding-where they remain today. This is the extreme manifestation of this resentment and extreme nationalism that the Chinese government encourages to keep their youth focused on the shortcomings of others and not turn their attention on the failings of their own unelected rulers. Indeed, the Communist Party's official mouthpiece, China Central Television, posted a photograph of Grace Wang on its Web site with the caption: "The Most Hideous Overseas Chinese Student." So the Chinese government is not just tolerating this vilification, they are actively inciting it.
What is happening to Wang is a witchhunt and it is being manipulated by the Chinese government. Chinese students have been protesting all over the U.S. in recent days-against CNN and against the Olympic torch relay being disrupted-and I sense a backlash against this activity in America coming. These people are not U.S. citizens but they are acting in this unaccustomed way in the U.S. It is a sad, scary realization of the Chronicle headline.
Background context of what happened to Wang is that since the recent tragic events in Tibet broke out starting on March 10 (the anniversary of the Dalai Lama's 1959 fleeing into exile in India from Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese occupation), there was an exchange of political views on the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association Web site, dukechina.org and their listserv, china@duke.edu.
The messages got increasingly abusive and profane, many aimed at me for positing a less than rosy view of China's custodianship of Tibet over the past half-century and some Chinese friends of mine who dared to defend me (not all Chinese accept the Chinese government's sanitized version of history). I told DCSSA President Li Zhizhong as early as the middle of March-three weeks before the attacks on Grace Wang-that if he did not take some action and post a warning that profane or personal attacks would not be tolerated on the listserv and enforce that and remove those messages from the archive on the Duke-China Web site where they were posted prominently on the home page, that it would just encourage more abuse and that the anonymous attacks would only escalate as the Tibet-China conflict got more heated. Zhizhong told me that he would see what he could do, but he did nothing. And of course when the events at the protest on April 9 happened, my prediction proved true and those same people turned their anonymous attacks on Wang, and we have all seen the tragic results.
What we are witnessing here on the Duke campus is a microcosm of the international tension between the People's Republic of China and its western trading partners. It is a clash of world views, a conflict of values that many experts consider very dangerous and are very worried about. What was done to Wang in unacceptable, period. But it is important for all sides to reflect on the complex factors that contributed to it happening, so it does not happen at Duke again. It is useful for as many people as possible to become aware of this specific sensibility and historical grudge of so many Chinese people because they are now our class- and community-mates. Conversely, these Chinese guests must recognize that they are not in China but in the U.S., and come to understand that a very different standard of constitutionally-protected free speech and free expression pertains here. Only in this way can we avoid repeating the tragedy that has happened to our fellow Duke community member Wang, and promote international peace and harmony, in keeping with the "One World, One Dream" slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Scott Savitt, Trinity '85, is a former foreign correspondent for United Press International and the Los Angeles Times in Beijing. He is a friend of Grace Wang and has been advising her as well as commenting on the case for the media.
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